renovating an old house with my boy and some helping hands

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We try to use every tiny nook for storage in our treehouse. It’s a rather small house (at least for Austrian standards) and although we wanttry need to downsize and get rid of S T U F F we do need proper and smart storage solutions for the stuff we cant get rid off.footnote: I really looking forward to life with less things… I apprecheate the movement of downsizing and living simple life. Where you are surounded with quality stuff or things you really love. Reward yourself with quality items rather than quantity… Do you know Melanie of a small life. she’s my downsizing hero… and I really love her shiny airstream.
Anyway we decided to use the space within the attic by building a cupboard on one side. We used the same system like we did in Lindas nursery. With sliding doors. As doors we reused old wooden window shutters from my parents house which where used 80 to 100 years ago within the old windows.

Schorsch and Martin renovated and adapted them. As they have been folding shutters they braced them with wooden strips and sanded them while my mum painted them with a matte finish from farrow and ball (wevet in estate eggshell).

We successfully decorated the nursery wall with those beautiful wooden shingles but also for the other side of the wall we decided to go with a bold wall decoration: a wallpaper.
I searched oline for the perfect match but couldn’t find anything I had in mind, so we decided to design our own wallpaper!
I scanned an old photo of my grandma which I really love (actually I really love both: my granny and the photo of her in this beautiful dress next to the first car my gradpa and she owned) and made a photo of the blank nursery wall in our attic. (Simply, to get an idea what it will look like) I roughly sketched the result on my computer and showed it to Martin and he loved it right away.

We decided to give it a try in real life and had it printed with a wallpaper printing company.
My mum is pretty experienced when it comes to mounting wallpapers and she did a great job with mounting the huge photo wallpaper as well.

(no worries: the part far right where the wallpaper ends will be hidden in our built-in cupboard.)

You know we had some special plans for decorating our nursery wall with wooden shingles which we imported from our latest trips to the far west of Austria. I love the look of those little beaver tail shingled houses in the region of Vorarlberg and I thought it would look beautiful in our nursery too. Like small ruffles – girly but not too sugary.
We had our insider Anja over (she’s originally from Vorarlberg knowing those ruched houses too well) to help us dealing with the shingles. My dad and Martin decided to go with an air pressure stapler instead of glue and so we started.

My part was (being 38 weeks pregnant and almost unable to move in any other way than far-preggo-slow-mo) to sort the shingles (there’s a front and a backside and I also sorted out all of the broken or twisted ones). While my dad, Martin and Anja began to ajust the laser and start to staple the first shingles onto the wall.
After a few rows we they had figured out the best way to get a good and even result and a pretty productive workflow. Like with every work the beginning is the hardest until you find the right flow, here it was tricky to decide whether to mount the shingles with the mathematical levelness or the optical one, the house is old and hardly anything in there is really even. (we went for the middle path and did a mixture between mathematical and optical)
That day we worked for a few more hours until we reached the light switch.
Martin spend his entire after-(day-job)-work-hours during the entire week in the treehouse mounting hundreds of shingles one after the other and dealing with tricky parts like embed the light switch fixture. A hell of a lot of work but it truly payed off.
I love the outcome so much! Maybe the nursery is my favorite room so far! (sorry bathroom!)
Schorsch and Martin also installed sliding doors for Linda’s future built-in-cupboard.
I painted the doors in three different colors and of course I chose them from my favorite color supplier: Farrow & Ball(Hello, my name is Katharina and I’m a F&B addict!..) I picked a vivid orange, a brownish shade of grey and a (not too pink) salmon tone. Again I wanted it to look warm and girly but not too-hello-kitty-girly-pink (no offence miss kitty!).
Farrow and Ball paints are pricey but they have such a high coverage that I could paint the cupboard door (three times) and it was still enough paint left from the 0,75l container to paint Linda’s changing unit and the door frame also with “London clay”.
I show you the results in a few weeks when everything is finished and we are finally moving in!

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My name is…

Katharina. I love photography and interior design. I got a tiny old house and a big tree. see the pictures, read the stories, get inspired by all the bits and pieces I collect here in my little corner of the internet. enjoy.